True Conservatives shouldn't have voted Conservative in the European Elections

On the eve of the Euro election I blogged explaining why I wasn't going to vote Conservative. Unfortunately, for legal reasons it had to be held over till after the elections, but what I wrote then is still just as true now: the conservatives are a slippery bunch who did not deserve our vote because they are still failing to talk like conservatives on a number of issues, one of the obvious ones being Europe.

The final straw for me was reading William Hague's defence of the Conservatives' Euro policy in the Spectator last week. It starts full of sound and fury. "Yes!" you go. "You tell 'em, Willy", as the bald one lists the manifest iniquities of Britain's relationship with the EU. Here's a taste:

"Most significant provisions in the Lisbon Treaty were originally opposed by the government, but ministers were too weak to stand their ground. The Treaty is almost identical to its predecessor, the EU constitution, to whose text the government sought 275 amendments, of which only 27 were accepted. Years have been wasted on institutional navel-gazing when the real issue ought to have been Europeâ€™s declining global competitiveness because Labour ministers let others set the agenda."

"The Treaty is not the only British failure of recent years. This government has failed to deal with the burden of unnecessary EU red tape: at a total cost of Â£53 billion, 70 per cent of the cost on businesses of new regulation since Labour came to power has been European in origin. The European Commissionâ€™s recent creditable and partly successful efforts to cut the costs of regulation and move the EU in a more free-market direction have been fought all the way by Labour MEPs and their Socialist allies."

"Nor has this government succeeded in securing value and fairness for Britain in the EU budget. Blair and Brownâ€™s original position on Britainâ€™s rebate was that it was non-negotiable. That evolved into a willingness to compromise in return for substantive reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, not a wholly unreasonable position. Yet the government ended up agreeing to cut the rebate by Â£7 billion, a sum now sorely missed, in return for a mere review of the CAP â€” a review that had already been agreed and which ended up changing very little. Seldom in history can a British government have shown such feebleness in defence of Britainâ€™s interests, securing nothing of substance in return for concessions on a grand scale."

Nothing to dispute there, I'm sure you'll agree. As damning a case for pulling out as ever a Tory politician has made. But then, about three quarters of the way in, Hague performs an almost complete volte-face. He declares:

"Given the extent of Labourâ€™s failure in Europe, can we do better? As every politician on earth now likes to say, yes we can. We need to be energetically engaged in Europe, making the case for modernity, openness and flexibility. On a range of issues, the nations of Europe can achieve much more by working together through the EU: on tackling climate change, on extending free trade through the Single Market and combating protectionism."

Crikey, whichever scriptwriter put in that "Yes we can" reference should be shot, but that's by the by. What's most objectionable here is the weasel sophistry, the denial of the ineluctable logic of all that he has said before.

It's a bit like Chamberlain saying in his broadcast on September 3rd 1939 "This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received…"

And then going on to say:

"And consequently this country has decided to give Germany another chance, just in case it turns out that Hitler in fact strayed into Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia and Poland by accident and is in fact a thoroughly peace-loving fellow who means us only good."

I just don't trust the guy – Hague, I mean – do you? I don't trust the Conservatives generally. They're still treating us like children to whom they can happily and freely dissemble because they know what's really good for us and we don't.

I'm sick of all that. If there's one thing the Tories ought to have learned from the recent expenses saga it's that we want our politicians to be honest with us and reflect our genuine concerns about the world. They're still not doing it.

The Euro Elections were our last chance to fire a shot across these faux-Conservatives' bows. Now we've gone and blown it. Hello Blair Mk II – the cut price version.